Please Ansca, a REAL newText function.

I don’t want to “pi** on the parade” of recent development, Corona success, and all of the great things that you’ve been doing Ansca… because all of this is amazing and we (the community) love and share in the success… but I think it’s about time you put resources toward a REAL text display function.

No more monkey-wrenches, no more workarounds, no more “double the size then scale by 0.5” using Jonathan Beebe’s “retina text” function(s), no more “widget” library inclusions. Just the following:

  • A newText function that displays clean, crisp text at ALL resolutions on various devices. Given your history with Adobe, Photoshop, etc. (Carlos), this should be obvious. Photoshop doesn’t display blurry text when I change the document resolution from 72 dpi to 144 dpi (i.e. iPhone 3G to iPhone4). It scales UP that resolution (automatically) and the text is beautifully crisp.
  • A newText function which is FAST. This issue has been reported before: the current function yields an instant drop of 5 FPS on older devices and 2-3 FPS on newer devices, every time a new text item is displayed. Not a big deal for static text objects, but possibly a problem with in-game text objects like popup scores.

So please Ansca, consider this a serious priority. I believe this is a request that basically all users would benefit from. We might not all design games and/or use physics, but I can’t imagine many apps that don’t use text in some way. This is a truly global benefit for all Corona developers.

Brent Sorrentino
Ignis Design

P.S. - and I must apologize to Jonathan Beebe; I recently posted on the blog:
"Just to clarify, this problem does not occur when I scale my text objects on a per-object basis, and use the original Corona display.newText function..

http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/07/tip-say-goodbye-to-blurry-text-for-good/comment-page-1/#comment-4801

After further testing, this does still occur using the native newText function. It’s not your RetinaText function Jonathan, it’s Ansca’s implementation and some bug with the scaling and reference points. Sorry about that. [import]uid: 9747 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 313325[/import]

+1 [import]uid: 89239 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 66553[/import]

I am in!

+1! [import]uid: 89165 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 66555[/import]

+1 [import]uid: 62042 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 70202[/import]

+1, why not [import]uid: 16142 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 70206[/import]

+1 [import]uid: 13632 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 70218[/import]

+1 [import]uid: 40033 topic_id: 13325 reply_id: 70238[/import]

I couldnt agree more. And of course, nothing has been fixed about this issue.

I’m getting really fed up about all these small things that Ansca doesn’t do anything about.
What are we suppose to do with the display.newText() ?? Imo its almost useless for the following reasons:

* The only parameter you can set, is the actual text!

* You have no format settings for the text ( margin , leading , linespacing etc… )

* You can’t position the text pixel perfectly, as the width and height values are incorrect.

* The speed. The newText function is really, really slow.

* the \n character doesnt seem to work at all.

I am now seriously considering stop using Corona because of this and many other features that i feel should have been available from the very beginning.

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